Direct-marketing is often accomplished by calling potential customers in an outbound call campaign. Outbound call campaigns have very low rates of success, and, therefore, need to be efficient. One factor that affects an outbound call campaign's efficiency is the utilization of human sales agents. When a sales agent just sits there waiting for the called party to answer a call, the sales agent's time is being wasted. Clearly, this is inefficient.
To address this inefficiency, telecommunications switches have been built that automatically place telephone calls and wait for the called party to answer before transferring the call to an available sales agent. The telecommunications switch knows that the call has been answered by a human waiting and not, for example, but a fax machine or an answering machine by listening to sounds made by the other end. This addresses some of the disadvantages of telecommunications switches in the prior art, but not all of them, and, therefore, the need exists for new inventions in the design of telecommunications switches.